


Whatever dawn brings

by IsalaVanDiest



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Post Long Night, up to/after 8.03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-29 22:56:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18787957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IsalaVanDiest/pseuds/IsalaVanDiest
Summary: “At least I’ll always have had that. Even if you go south. Even if you can’t come back.”---Jon and Sansa, after the Long Night. What comes after surviving?





	Whatever dawn brings

**Author's Note:**

> Post-8.03 and, quite clearly, not taking in anything from 8.04  
> \--  
> Semi-experimental for me as I don't usually write in present tense.

“I thought I’d be dead.”

It’s been a full day, and a little more, since the great war ended, and every hour since has been filled with bodies and blood and fire, weeping and reckoning, the smell of ash and the smell of burning bodies, the taste of bile vinegary in the mouth. It feels like moons have passed since he woke to the strange grey light which could have been evening or a winter dawn and set out to look for her. The Lady of Winterfell’s hands are black with other people’s blood.

Sansa’s responding smile is faint and thin. Her eyes are pink from weeping and the thick white smoke that hangs, sour and insistent, over Winterfell.

“I thought you would be, too,” she says at last.

Jon had found her in a small, dusty room at long last, her own chambers being given over to cots for the wounded and dying. He had walked in without knocking, startling her from her sleep, but his pang of guilt was easy to set aside when she’d reached for him with arms wide outstretched, nudging Ghost to the side to make room to hold Jon to her on the rickety cot she lay on. The fire was very low. It was no place for a queen.

He hasn’t seen her since meeting her when she’d emerged from the crypts, leading a small boy out with one hand, the other still wrapped around her dagger. She’d run and pushed everyone else away to wrap her arms around him, and he felt rather than saw her sobs in the heaving of her chest. Her grip on his back hurt him. Her tears warmed his neck.

And then there had been Arya, scratched and bloody, with a fearful and proud fire in her eyes. At the sight of her little sister Sansa had fallen to her knees in front of her and wrapped an arm around Arya’s waist, one hand still in Jon’s. Kneeling, she murmured a long, low prayer of deliverance, gratitude, and as Jon swayed on his feet, the pulse of battle fading and leaving him lightheaded, he heard others in the hall take up the prayer and murmur it in a single exhausted rasp of relief and pain.

But the Lady of Winterfell had had things to do, the living to mend back together, and Sansa had risen to her feet to tend to her people and her castle. She had been the one who had knelt by Daenerys, frozen and still by Jorah Mormont’s body, blood drying on her face and hands and her beautiful hair, right there in the Great Hall of Winterfell. And it was Sansa who had put her hand on the lost queen’s back - just the fingertips, careful and afraid - and said something that convinced Dany to stand up and be helped back to her chambers where she could sleep and grieve and scream. Jon hadn’t seen either of them since, until now.

Sansa pushes herself upright, and he thinks she’ll get up, to go back to the duty that has become her strength. But instead she looks at him, one hand running softly through Ghost’s ash-streaked fur, one hand touching Jon’s hairline and jaw, his eyelids and lips and the bridge of his nose.

“You’re really here,” she says at the last, very softly. “I haven’t just dreamed this. You - you really did survive.” Her voice sounds like there is a bubble in her throat, translucent and shimmering and ready to break. 

“I’m alive,” he agrees, and he bites his tongue on the words that could follow - words about what good being alive has ever done him, how he’s been brought to life and allowed to survive to suffer and suffer again. Instead he knots his fingers in Ghost’s thick fur, his knuckles whitening. “I’m alive and I’m not what - not what and not who - I’ve always thought I was.”

Sansa does sit up properly then, releasing both Jon and Ghost from her grasp. Her usual composure is not complete, for she rubs at her eyes sleepily and unconsciously, leaving a streak of grime over her cheek. 

“You’re who you always have been, Jon,” she offers gently. “No more, and no less, than what you were before this war, if you will take it. You are a Stark, and a Black Brother, and a man who rose from the dead, and defeated the Boltons to take back your home - ”

“I’m not,” he says and then he breathes in hard and just says the words. “I’m not a Stark, Sansa. I - I found out who my mother is. Was.” He’s caught in the shining blue of her eyes like a brilliant, dazzling web and it’s impossible to turn away, to stop this now. “I’ve spent my life wondering about her, dreaming about who she was, how she felt about me and what I was to her. And it doesn’t matter, she didn’t even matter, not really, as much as who my father is, my real father, not Ned - ”

“I know.” Sansa’s sweep off the cot is abrupt, but she’s back in an instant, holding a basin and cloths. It’s been resting by the fire but the water she uses to wipe the tears from his cheeks is only lukewarm. “I know about Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna.”

He feels Ghost shift between them, warm and warning, even as he feels himself going still. He should not be surprised that she still has the power to surface, behind the stillness of her face that’s as calm as a mirror. But her touch is hesitant when she brings the cloth back to his face. He closes his eyes as she removes the sweat and gore that has been drying there since the Long Night ended.

He doesn’t need to ask.

“Bran told me,” she says, “While we were waiting for your return.”

“Why?”

“Because he trusted me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me, Sansa? You’ve pretended this entire time I’ve been back, while I - ” He tries to imagine what it would have been like to speak with her about this terrible thing that Sam had given to him, like a dead spider, to live with and carry with him and never, ever unsee again. To let his whole history spool and unspool in the light of this new harsh truth with his head on Sansa’s shoulder, her fingers stroking his hair as she does now.

“It wasn’t Bran’s secret to tell, really,” she says finally. “I wanted to wait for - for you to tell me. I knew you would. And if you decided not to...I am Sansa Stark, the daughter of Eddard Stark, who knew the value of silence.” She bites back a sob, and he sees how her teeth cut into her lip, the effort it takes. “I’m so glad you came to tell me, Jon, so glad you’re alive, you and Arya - my pack - and Bran - nothing else matters, this is all I’ve wanted. All of it, all of us together, where we belong.” And with that she’s weeping, as silently as she can, hair hanging before her, and when he leans in to hold her, awkwardly over Ghost’s body still between them, he can hear her whispering the same prayer she sang in the hall.

It takes her a long time to spend her tears - the woman who, since becoming Lady of Winterfell, vowed to no longer weep, and she cuddles into Ghost, nuzzling his neck while she regains her poise, and Jon swallows numbly as he watches his direwolf return her caresses. 

The fire flickers and shoots sparks, and the dim light is even lower. 

“Sansa,” he whispers into the dark, which is red and black like the battle. “I don’t know what to do any more.”

She reaches for him again and tugs him to lay down again and it’s the sweetest thing, to close his eyes and let her hold his hand so he can speak as if only to himself into the stale air. 

“For years I’ve been thinking about this one thing, this terrible thing coming to us, and it was my duty to tell everyone, to warn everyone, and to save them...I even, gods, thought it was my destiny, I thought I actually had a destiny. To save the world, and Winterfell - and you - and Arya and Bran and everyone I love. And it was a good thing to think that, to think I would die for everyone who I really wanted to live, who would rebuild.” He looks at her hand in his, the slender wrists, the long pale fingers. “And be good and rebuilding. But it’s over now and I’m - I’m here, I’m still here, and it’s done, and I don’t know what to do anyone. I’ve lived for this, and died for this, and lived again, and now it’s gone. It’s over. After all these years.”

“It’s not over,” Sansa says, and the words are sour milk. “You’re going to march south with the Dragon Queen - another war to fight, a city to conquer and then a kingdom to hold. You’ll fight, and fight, and fight.” The fire crackles and spits. “I’ll be here to hold the North for you and her while you do what needs to be done far away.”

“I don’t want to go,” he says, quickly. “I don’t - I’ll come back. I won’t stay there. My home is here.”

It’s quiet and still for a long time after, no sound but their breathing, and the rhythmic sound of her hands stroking Ghost. The fire is close to giving up, and the room is going from red to a cool grey, and he knows when it goes out they really will need to get up, cold chasing them. 

“You don’t know the Faith of the Seven well,” Sansa says finally, and the sound of her voice surprises him as much as her words. “Why would you? It was my mother’s religion, and she...but anyhow. She taught it to me, as a child, all the words and the prayers. I used to love sitting in the sept and seeing the light on the coloured glass, and learning the songs and prayers.” Her voice was thick and warm. “There’s a prayer that we sing to remind us of our duties in the world, seven acts which the faithful carry out in the realm of the living, one for each god. Nourish the hungry, and provide shelter to those without; give comfort to the afflicted, and tend to the sick. Bear our wrongs with compassion.” She laughs a little at that one. “Uphold justice for the imprisoned, and bury and pray for the beloved dead.

“I thought you’d be dead, and Arya. The North a ravaged wasteland and nothing left but fire and dragons and another war to fight, another road to march, and myself alone among it. But we are here, and alive, and I think...I think these are the things I will do.”

“Nourish the hungry,” he repeats, in order to remember, “Shelter those without; comfort the afflicted; tend to the sick. Bear our wrongs with compassion, uphold justice, bury the dead.” They’re good things, he realises. Things he could do, if there were time. “It sounds like Ned,” he said, “All the things he did.” The man he still thought of as his father - his true father - worshipped the Old Gods, and these were the words of the Seven. But it was all the same underneath.

“It will be hard,” Sansa says, her voice a tired rasp. “It would have been easier to burn it all down. It’s so much harder to rebuild than to destroy, to live than to die. But there are dead I must grieve for and bury, now and for a long time.”

“Theon.”

“Theon,” she whispers back, like the rustle of a breeze through pine trees. “Lyanna Mormont - for all that she and her house have given, and given, and given, to House Stark. For Rickon - there was so little time to grieve my baby brother. Robb, and mother.” Her voice breaks at the last on a sob. “My own lady mother. I thought of her so much. I need to mourn them and honour them as they should have been - now that we have the time. And I will grieve for Bran, too, who is no longer who he was - and Arya, who isn’t my little sister anymore. She belongs to all of us now. To songs and stories.” He feels her shift closer, head against his shoulder. “My beloved dead.”

It’s a good place to start, he thinks. Building beginnings out of endings. He tells her so, just as the fire dies out in a last shattering spray of red and gold and black. 

In the cool dark he feels rather than sees her, and her mouth on his is unexpected, and it takes a moment for him to know it has happened and respond, to hold her properly, his hands full of her loose hair which smells of sage and ash. It’s the sweetest thing he’s ever known, he thinks, in this room full of smoky air, and the smell of damp leather and the sweat of their bodies, dark as midnight and his direwolf grunting somewhere at their feet. 

“At least I’ll always have had that,” she tells him once they’ve finally pulled apart. “Even if you go south. Even if you can’t come back.”

He’s holding a fistful of her hair and he doesn’t want to set her free. He can hear the sounds of the castle awakening, men’s voices seeping through the door, and he knows the dark and the quiet and her mouth and hair and hands cannot last much longer. It will all break soon enough, in time for the next battle, fire and blood, blood and flesh.

“At least I’ll always have had that,” he whispers back, and kisses her eyelids and cheeks and mouth again until he feels her smile. “Whatever dawn brings. Even if I have to go south.”

Even if he can’t come back.

**Author's Note:**

> The seven acts of the faithful which Sansa describes are based on the Roman Catholic church's works of charity/mercy.


End file.
